Two for the Prize

The two scholars picked by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences last week to share the $125,000 Nobel Prize in Economics have many things in common. Sweden's Gunnar Myrdal and Austrian-born, British-naturalized Friedrich A. von Hayek are both, at 75, still vigorously writing and teaching as visiting professors -- Myrdal at the City College of New York and Von Hayek at Salzburg University. Both men achieved early recognition, as the academy noted, "for their pioneering work in the theory of money and economic fluctuations." And both gained their widest audiences by going beyond the economist's blackboard model building to produce analyses of modern society through a broad and erudite multidisciplinary approach.

Longtime Gladiator. There, for the most part, the similarities end. A longtime gladiator in the public arena, Myrdal served in the Swedish Parliament in the 1930s and was an impor tant architect of the Swedish Labor Party's welfare state. He was his country's Commerce Minister from 1945 to 1947 and head of the United Nations Economic Commission for Europe for ten years after that. He is a considerably more familiar figure than his fellow laureate, largely because of two major works published nearly a quarter-century apart. While a professor at the Uni versity of Stockholm, Myrdal carried out extensive research in the U.S. to pro duce his classic An American Dilemma (1944). It interwove economics and sociology in arriving at its conclusion that white America had dangerously betrayed its ideals in its treatment of blacks. With Psychologist Kenneth Clark, Myrdal is now at work on a follow-up study.

In 1968, after a decade of research (much of it carried out while his wife Alva was Swedish Ambassador to India), he published what he called his "labor of love." Asian Drama: An Inquiry Into the Poverty of Nations pointed up, in 2,500 pages, the economic, political and social factors that impede progress in the world's most populous area. An apostle of thoroughgoing Swedish-style planning, Myrdal is a socialist who became in the late 1960s--though professing a sincere affection for the U.S.

--a frequent critic of growing American military and political involvement in Southeast Asia.

By contrast, Von Hayek, an old-fashioned economic liberal, has been more the traditional professor. Since 1931 he has taught at the Universities of London, Chicago (from which he retired at the age of 63) and Freiburg and has often lectured in Japan. A student of business cycles and one of the few economists to foresee the 1929 crash, he was cited by the academy for his work on the relative efficiency of different types of economic systems. The system that he has criticized most is the one advocated by Myrdal. In his 1944 international bestseller, The Road to Serfdom, Von Hayek warned that centralized planning, however idealistic, inexorably leads to the loss of freedom.

In a pluralistic world, there is room fof such disparate thinkers as Myrdal and Von Hayek and for the opposite courses to human fulfillment that they espouse. By honoring these two economists simultaneously, the Swedish Academy has cast a quiet vote for the world of diversity.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.